Here's the Tower

If you’re one of those people who feel that one-minute episodes are “kinda short,” oh boy, are you in for a treat. With a playing time of 2 hours and 25 minutes, this week’s episode is 145 times longer than usual.

In this special, extended episode, I sit down with my bandmates as we discuss our favorite albums.

My best friends Pat “Pea” McClimans, Chris “The Hört” Reinstatler, and I have traveled the world and played music for thousands of people. Our band, the Metroschifter, has played over 200 shows in 15 countries.

Though we haven’t played a show together in about ten years, it hasn’t stopped the three of us from continuing to travel together. It’s kind of like we’re still going on tour, but we just don’t play music for other people anymore.

In just the past few years, we have traveled to the Oregon coast, the Netherlands, Joshua Tree National Park and, well, several undisclosed locations that I can’t talk about for security reasons.

One afternoon in September 2018, we were hanging out in Hört’s apartment in Long Beach, California. He has a big, hardcover coffee table book there called The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, published by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine. 

It’s a massive, heavy book of more than 200 pages, and the more we looked through it, the more ridiculous it became. 

As you’ll hear in this episode, we had a lot of problems with this book. So after bitching about it for quite some time that afternoon, Pea, Hört and I eventually decided to make our own lists.

To make it more manageable, we decided to go with Top 15 lists instead of submitting our Top 50 or Top 500 favorite albums.

And rather than ranking what we thought were the greatest albums of all time – a term that we felt had a connotation of historical or cultural significance – we opted to make lists of our own Top 15 albums from a perspective of personal importance, relevance to our own lives, and basically, our favorites.

We spent a few hours that afternoon compiling our lists and when the lists were ready, we sat down around a microphone to discuss our choices. 

There is a page at kcomposite.com/albums where you can see our favorite albums and listen to them free if you are an Apple Music subscriber.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Adventures in Design episode #827 “A Man Out of Time” with guest Scott Ritcher link

Adventures in Design episode #914 “Old Timey Radio Memes” with guest Scott Ritcher link

Bedtime Bourbon, a very small batch straight bourbon whiskey available only in Kentucky: louisvillebourbon.com

The Metroschifter’s favorite albums with links to iTunes and Apple Music: kcomposite.com/albums

Tired of people wanting you to do things?

Now you can act like you’re busy… listening to a baseball game.

Baseball Simulator plays random phrases from baseball games indefinitely.

Since most people don’t care about baseball, they’ll never notice it’s not a real game.

With a handsome woodgrain finish, Baseball Simulator looks like a real radio.

You can place it in your home, your office, by the backyard grill, or anywhere you want it to seem like you’re listening to a baseball game.

And it’s portable! Take it on the go and Baseball Simulator will play for up to 48 hours on a single charge.

Guest voice in this episode: Pat McClimans as the guy who wants people to think he’s listening to a baseball game.

Please be advised that this week’s episode is intended for immature audiences only. If there are adults in the room, please ask them to step outside for a minute.

A bit of administrative business this week. The sound that starts and ends every episode of this program is sometimes called the NASA beep or the com switch, but its real name is the Quindar tone.

Every episode of Here’s the Tower – and the episodes of my previous show Snuggling with the Enemy that I made with with my friend Karin – they all start and end with these tones.

Like many other people, I erroneously believed that this beep occurred between when Mission Control spoke and when the astronauts spoke; like a walker talkie, the beep was like the static sound that signaled when the other party’s transmission was complete.

I have since discovered, while watching old Apollo documentaries, that the tone was used in signaling the transmitters around the world that relayed communications to and from the spacecraft. Therefore, the tone did not occur when the astronauts talked amongst each other, for example, during space walks or on the surface of the Moon.

I have heard thousands of Quindar tones over several decades as a part of my enthusiasm for the Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle missions, but suffice it to say that I have always misunderstood their purpose.

Furthermore, I never noticed that there are actually two different tones.

There is an intro tone at 2,525 Hz which signals the engagement of the push-to-talk button and an outro tone that signals the release at a slightly lower frequency of 2,475 Hz.

The difference between these two frequencies is only noticeable if you really listen for it, but the relay stations could tell them apart. These particular tones were chosen because they’re in the same frequency range as human voices and were therefore easy to broadcast through the same channels that Mission Control used to talk with the astronauts.

The tone I have been using in dozens of episodes of this and my previous podcast has been identical at the beginning and end of each episode, which has been incorrect.

The sample I have been using has been a fairly dirty recording of an outro tone that I seem to remember copying from the audio of an early Shuttle mission.

I apologize to anyone who has been disturbed by my use of an outro tone at both the beginning and end of each episode. From now on, you’ll hear the proper intro and outro Quindar tones in future episodes of Here’s the Tower.

As a side note, Quindar tones are 250 milliseconds in length. That’s a quarter of a second. So the beginning and ending Quindar tones combined have subtracted a full half second from every episode. That’s a full 19 seconds of our valuable time together that has been wasted listening to beeps.

Here’s the Tower presents its first quarter financial earnings conference call for fiscal 2019.

Key takeaway: User engagement continues to be a challenge in the one-minute audio adventure marketplace.